Moving an account's history

You replaced a card. You refinanced the mortgage. Your bank reissued the account and it came back as a new one. Now you have two accounts — one holding the history, one holding the future — and neither of them is the whole story.

Transfer data moves the history onto the account you are keeping. It is how you merge two accounts into one, in everything but name. Open the account you are moving from — the old one — and find Transfer data in its menu.

Nothing happens until the last step

The wizard walks you through picking a destination, deciding about transactions, deciding about balances, taking a backup, and reading a summary of what is about to happen. You can go through all of it and close the window; nothing is written until you press Permanently transfer data.

That matters more here than in most places in SageFin, because this is one of the few actions with no undo.

Where the history can go

SageFin lists the accounts that cannot receive the transfer along with the reason, rather than quietly leaving them out:

• This is the same account.
• Accounts must be the same type. A credit card's history does not belong on a savings account.
• Data can't be transferred into a manual account — it owns its own balance. A manual account's balance is whatever you typed, so there is nothing for a transfer to reconcile against.
• The destination account is hidden. Unhide it first, so you can see what you did.
• This account's history was already transferred away. It has nothing left to give.

Transactions and balances are separate decisions

Move the transactions, or leave them. Usually you want to move them — that is the point.

Copy the balance history, or do not. Worth copying when the old account's balances are the better record, which is the usual case after a reissue: the new account knows about last week, the old one knows about the last three years.

SageFin describes this as copying recorded balances rather than days. It stores a balance for a day something actually reported one and works out the days in between, so a count of days would be a number it invented.

The two dates are not the same date

Each half splices at its own transition date, and they are found in different ways: transactions split at the source's last transaction, balances at the day before the destination account was created. Those can sit a long way apart — a year, in one real case — so do not be surprised when the summary quotes two dates.

What else comes across

Transactions and balances are the visible part. The transfer also re-points anything else attached to the old account: recurring charges, goals and their allocations, and — on an investment account — holdings and investment transactions. The summary counts each one.

Two things cannot simply move, because an account can only have one: a debt payoff plan and mortgage details. If the destination already has one, SageFin says so rather than overwriting it.

Overlapping transactions are deleted

If the destination already has transactions covering the period being moved, those are permanently deleted so the same spending does not land twice. The review step tells you how many before you commit — read that number. It is the part of this that surprises people.

Take the backup

The backup step downloads four CSV files: transactions and balances, for both accounts.

These files are the only way back. There is no undo, and the old account will not be holding a spare copy. If you continue without downloading them, SageFin will say so — and let you, because it is your call.

What happens to the old account

The review step spells this out before you commit, and it is worth reading rather than clicking past.

It is hidden, not deleted. You can remove it yourself later if you want to.

Anything that did not transfer stays on it, and stays visible in your transactions list.

Its balance history stops at the transition date. SageFin will not draw a curve for it before that day, and that is deliberate. Once its transactions live somewhere else, a line for last March would be reconstructed from data the account no longer has — a confident-looking figure with nothing behind it. A history that stops is the honest answer to what was this account worth in March: it was worth what it was worth, and the account that can now tell you is the other one.

For the same reason it stops being checked for balance drift.

Afterwards

The destination account holds both histories, and your net worth, budgets and reports read as though there had only ever been one account.

If a transfer fails partway, it does not leave you half-moved — SageFin reports the failure and leaves both accounts as they were.

If something looks wrong afterwards, the CSV files are the route back — and it is a manual one: importing the transactions into the old account, pointing goals and recurring charges at it again, and unhiding it. That is worth knowing before you decide the download step is optional.

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